So we are short of doctors but

you are not allowed to hire any more?

In an almost suburb south of here there is a medical clinic which is in actual danger of closing although it is clearly needed. It may close because it cannot get doctors. It cannot get doctors because the government is restricting the employment of them.

It is a ridiculous situation. Young, inexperienced GPs have, rightly, to work alongside more experienced staff for a period of time. Yes, things have changed. Being a GP now takes the same length of time as the training for any speciality. Medicine has changed. 

It may have changed for the better in many ways. I am not that sort of doctor. I don't know. I do know that we need doctors and I am grateful they have access to an enormous range of information from other sources. Young doctors come in with new knowledge but they do not have experience. They need it and the government has recognised that. 

So the government has restricted where they can work to begin with but they have also restricted the number of fully qualified doctors who can work elsewhere. Hiring experienced doctors from abroad is also not something you can do if you are not in a designated area. The problem is that populations and areas change and some of those designated areas have not changed for a long time. 

If I pedal half a kilometre to the main road going one way I could go to four medical clinics spread out over a kilometre to a main road going another way. Cross over the road and I can go to at least another three. I can go in another direction and find more. If I went to the almost suburb in the south it would be a very different story. I say "almost suburb" because there is still a gap between the present suburbs and the area in question. When I was a mere kitten this area was "country". This was farming land and the population was much smaller. That has changed - but the designation of the area has not. The Minister in question could change the designation but has not.

 Now we are being told that there is some sort of "review" going on. Someone will be paid to be doing that "review". I suggest all it would take would be to look at some statistics available from sources that even a school student could find. They would soon find the area needs more resources.

The question then is whether we should poach more doctors from abroad. I suspect we would find doctors are needed in other places as well and we should not be poaching them. 

The answer is not simple but actually preventing more being hired because an area is designated as one thing rather than another seems rather foolish to me.  

It is ANZAC Day and my

godfather is still alive and can remember his war experiences - remember them all too clearly.

Nearly eighty years after the end of WWII those events are still impacting the people who experienced them. They may be a dwindling number but they lived through horrors I cannot even begin to imagine.

Yes, I know we have had wars since then. There are wars going on now. I keep working because people keep fighting as well as because of natural disasters. I only do less work than I once did because other people and technology have taken over from me.  My godfather and his mates had no access to anything like that.

If my godfather had been captured by the Japanese, and he might easily have been, he would not have survived. He is a tall, skinny man. He has always been like that. The work on the Burma railway would have killed him very quickly because he already had the beginnings of the back condition which has caused him to wear a "corset" for the rest of his life. His hearing was impacted too. 

My godfather came home and went back to work. Eventually he changed jobs because he could no longer do the physical work involved in his specialist one. He ended up in a very responsible position and was very successful at it. Now a widower with two children he has perhaps had what some people would call a "happy" life.  Maybe it could at least be said he has been content with his lot but there are moments.

I know there will be moments today. He is about to turn one hundred. His son will get him somewhere today so he can reflect quietly. He no longer goes to any of the Dawn services. We no longer have the little moment in our street. The people involved have moved on. The children here are too young for such emotional occasions.

So I went elsewhere for my godfather. It was chilly but I put on an extra layer and pedalled off in the "not quite light" knowing that any passing police patrol would know where I was going and why. I was on the footpaths and had the light on the trike. There was a police car parked near the venue I attended. One of them was there leaning against the vehicle. He was talking quietly into his phone. He stopped as I came up looking for somewhere safe to leave the trike. 

"Lock it to this," he said, indicating a "no parking" post. He took the chain and the lock to do it for me. For a short time it seems this was a parking area. 

"Thanks for coming," he told me softly. I am guessing he knew people who are now parked somewhere else - forever. 

So what is "free speech" and does it

actually matter?

There is yet more in today's paper about the demand of our government to the owner of X (Twitter). 

"Remove that footage or face a fine!" the government is declaring. "It is violent. It is extremist. It will do harm."

The footage in question was, up to a certain point in the clip, aired on national television. It had gone around the world many times, been shared many more times before the government acted. By then it was simply too late to do anything about it.

Rightly or wrongly the owner of X challenged the move. There is now a major problem where there could have been a minor one. The government has moved itself into a position where it is actually saying, "We control social media, not you. We can decide what people will see." 

I have absolutely no issue at all with people being prosecuted for posting violent, extremist, racist or other vile footage. We should come down on them hard and fast. Whether we can control and demand the owner of X for it however is another story.  Is it something which would give a government control of what we see? Would it allow them to censor "misinformation" they do not want us to see?

It is possible it could. Under sec. 51(v) of our Constitution the government has the power to make laws about "postal, telegraphic, telephonic, and other like services". That certainly covers the internet. Imagine having the power to control the internet. The government does in North Korea. Most people there know very little about the outside world and they are not permitted to travel either. It is one of the many ways in which the government keeps such tight control over the population.

No, we won't go that far but the government is seeking to control what we see and hear. They are anxious, or so they claim, to prevent the spread of "misinformation". That can all too easily mean anything they disagree with or anything that might harm their control over us. 

I don't know anyone who disagrees with the idea that the climate is changing but I do know people who disagree with the ideas about why it is changing. Even people who agree will disagree with how it should be handled. But then comes something interesting. Ask people what the biggest problem is and those words "carbon emissions" will come up over and over again. We have to be "carbon neutral" we are told. Someone I know who works in a very senior capacity in environment, a trained scientist, told me not so long ago that carbon emissions make up 0.04 of the atmosphere - and we actually need at least 0.03 of those in order to survive. In other words it is not the problem we make it out to be. There are problems but they are not the problems we are being told about. It is convenient for the government to let us go on believing this though because they have invested vast sums of money in telling us this. This is in no way to deny we need to do something about the environment - and do it quickly - but it may be that carbon emissions are not the main source of the problems we face.  Misinformation from the government and other sources will allow us to go on believing otherwise. It may be that we are also being misled about other problems because of what the government wants us to know.

I may be very misinformed. I am almost certainly misinformed about a lot of things but I do not want to be further misinformed because the government has control of what I can and cannot see. Violence and real harm can be dealt with in other ways.  

Walking on water or

in this case on the bed of a lake. 

We have just been told yet another place in the state is now out of bounds. We cannot enter it without permission from the indigenous owners of it because it is "sacred". 

This is a recent development. The area in question has long been a major tourist attraction but visits to it will now be controlled by the "local indigenous owners". 

Let me go back to when my family was living south of the lake. The lake is, for most of the time, a salt pan. If there is sufficient rain there will be water in the salt pan. (The water is not drinkable.) 

We went to look at it. It was long trek over what was little more than a dirt track. The idea that it might be a tourist attraction at the time was something we did not even consider. The Senior Cat simply thought we should see it, as a salt pan. 

I remember standing there with the faintly pink salt feeling all crunchy under me. Mum, rightly, made us wear our solid school footwear. The salt is hard on skin. It can cut you. I remember the eldest boy of the family we went with rubbing his finger along the salt and getting a "burn" mark. He said it stung "like crazy". 

When it is dry the glare from the sun on the salt is intense. It seems to smother you. The whole area is almost always dry. It is not friendly country. I did not like being there however "interesting" I might have been supposed to find it. 

Donald Campbell broke the last wheel driven land speed record on that same lake a couple of years later. It was almost certainly the most likely place to break it. When we were there you could look out across the lake. It's big. It covers an area of over 9,000km sq.  If you stood where we were standing the other side is over the horizon but it is really nothing more than a shallow depression below sea level far inland.

It has now become a "sacred" place that you can only visit it if guided (at a cost) by the local "indigenous" owners - the Arabana people.  One of these indigenous owners was interviewed on the news last night. If I had passed her in the street I would not have recognised her as "indigenous". This morning my friend M... left me a message asking if I had seen the clip. His tribal grouping comes from further south. He does not claim to know anything about the Arabana tribe but he made the comment, "Interesting it now has such cultural significance when money can be made out of it."

There have been some visiting restrictions for a number of years but, until now, they have simply been for safety reasons. I suspect there should be restrictions for safety reasons - particularly if there is a wet season. Whether there should be for "cultural" reasons is something I am much less certain about. 

There has been a backlash over this. It is not the first "sacred site" where people claiming to be members of a local indigenous tribe have sort to restrict access to an area. Access will sometimes be granted if money changes hands. Parks and wildlife reserves are gradually being taken over. Perhaps that can be a good thing where truly indigenous people take over and know their own land and how to manage it. More and more often though I doubt how much indigenous heritage some of the activists have and how valid some of their demands are. Do we really go on denying 97% of the population access to areas in order to appease the 3% who claim to be indigenous? In reality it is far less than 3% who make these demands and others in the group seem not to even understand what the fuss is about. They no longer follow a traditional lifestyle. The folklore of their past has been diluted by present knowledge. 

It seems to me that there is a very small group of people who are intent on using their assumed cultural heritage for other purposes. What concerns me is that we could actually lose it all as they pursue their demands to stay still and not move on.  The idea of standing at the edge of that dry, slightly pink and salty lake forever does not appeal to me.

 

Free speech or something else?

I am wondering whether I will get kicked off X for posting this. Will there be a knock at the door because the government has decided I am a danger to society and need to be put away?

More seriously, is social media really out of control? I doubt it can be stopped now. The lid is well and truly off the container and the contents are spilling out. We can now comment to everyone on things we could just mention only to people we actually saw during the day. Is it any wonder Elon Musk is ignoring the government's attempt to make him take down what is considered to be "violent" footage of the stabbing of a priest.

It was vile. It should be taken down. The problem however is a little bit more complex than the media and the government have been suggesting. Yes, you could try and take it down - but by the time those responsible for taking such material down it has already been seen. It has been seen and shared again...and again...and again. It will also be shared in slightly different ways which makes it even harder to ensure it gets removed. I am not sure it can even be removed completely. I doubt it is a simple matter of just pressing a "delete" button. If it was we could have an army of volunteers removing such material...or could we? 

You see it is my opinion (and undoubtedly the opinion of almost anyone who reads this) that we do not need to see little video clips of priests being attacked.  Someone else obviously felt differently. They filmed the event and then posted it...and it spread from there. They may even have manipulated the images they posted. I will never know. Other people obviously thought the clip was worth "reposting" and suddenly the whole thing was out of hand. 

Is there software which would prevent such actions or do people somewhere have to go through the millions of posts and remove the images? Can you just remove the first post and thereby make it impossible to keep passing it on? I don't know.

Even if it is possible I doubt that removing such material is easy. Yes, we need to try. If we do however then we also need to ensure that mainstream media cannot post such material either....and there we start to have a problem. It is called "censorship" because it is a very, very small step from demanding that something actually harmful is taken down to demanding something be taken down because it harms the government of the day. 

We need to do something about the problem but it is going to be much harder than demanding Mr Musk and others simply use the delete button.  

Going to live in another country

by choice is one thing. Going to live in another country because you must is something else.

An acquaintance of mine is about to move to America. It is a work choice for him. His wife has shrugged her shoulders and taken the line, "I married him. I go with him. I think it will be interesting."

No, it won't be forever. It will be for several years. They regard it as something of an adventure. 

There are three children. None of them want to go. The eldest is fifteen and he is implacably opposed to the move. He has his friends here of course but he has also been mature enough to realise that his education will be disrupted. Yes, there are undoubtedly good schools in America but he has been aiming on a course here which is very, very difficult to get into and a disruption like this will affect his chances. His grandparents were telling me about this yesterday. We discussed whether they should be offering to give him a home while his parents are away or whether he should perhaps board at school. (He could.) His sister wants to stay too. She is a child who, although popular enough, has only a few friends. The idea of a new school in another country "where everyone is already friends" does not appeal. I can understand that too. The youngest child is in the last year of the primary school. When I met him at the home of his grandparents he told me quietly, "I don't want to go either. It's okay for Mum and Dad because they are grown ups."

Their parents say it will be a good experience for them. They will experience another culture, a different education system, make new friends and much more. Perhaps. I don't know. 

It made me think of all the children who have been uprooted and forced to live somewhere else...forever. Their parents have migrated, willingly and unwillingly. The children have had to follow. Sometimes children have even had to go alone. 

Middle Cat's late father-in-law was just fifteen when he left Cyprus and came here. He came alone. He did not speak English. For him it was the opportunity of a lifetime. He wanted to do it. He was ambitious...and he did well. Over the years he brought out his siblings and then his parents, sponsoring each one of them in turn. It was hard work but they saw this country as one worthy of moving to permanently. I know many other people like them. 

I also know people for whom the move was too much. They have gone "home". Not so long ago I helped clear the house of an elderly woman who went "home" to the Netherlands after many years living here. She had no family here but there was family there. The family ties were stronger for her. 

Middle Cat asked me later where I would live given the choice. I don't know. It's difficult. It is not easy to answer the question of "where is home?" Is it family, friends or a place? 

National service needs to be

reinstated - and it needs to be compulsory.

I know that won't be a popular idea with some people but I am watching with some alarm two young people who are taking a "gap year" and doing absolutely nothing with it. One of them does have a few hours work now and then. The other is still doing nothing at all. He is spending his days out on his skateboard with a few mates. His parents seem to just accept this state of affairs.  

National service might just pull both of them into line and give them a purpose in life. National service might actually provide them with a way of contributing something.

I mentioned this to a neighbour who was watching the children tear up and down the street on their bikes and boards. This particular neighbour did a stint in the army. He doesn't like the idea of pushing people into military national service but, like me, he thinks a year in some form of national service between school and university is a very good idea. It could even be two years where a teen has no idea what they want to do with their lives and they have no qualifications.

What is wrong with expecting young people to contribute something? Do we really want bored teens hanging around with nothing to do? Isn't that how the worst trouble starts? 

Yes, I know there are teens who have worked incredibly hard through school. They have put their all into getting the results they get. Yes, they need a holiday because everyone needs a holiday sometimes. But do they need an entire year (plus several months) before they start again?

We didn't have gap years of course. They were unknown when I was that young. (It was an awfully long time ago now.) We couldn't "defer" either. You went on with your studies or you went to work. It was not nearly as easy to get any sort of unemployment benefits either. Things have changed. The current system is possibly too lenient but it may also be more realistic. All sorts of jobs once available to school leavers with few or even no qualifications have gone. It seems to me that reason is reason enough alone to introduce a form of national service which would provide, at very least, basic skills for some. This may be nothing more than the basic skill of turning up to work on time and following instructions but it would be a good skill to learn. 

And yes, I would include both sexes in national service. Why not? It seems to me that almost anything would be better than watching the two young people I know becoming more and more dissatisfied and bored with life. They are coming to believe that the world owes them a living...and it doesn't.